A superior analogy would be to regard the universe as consisting of language, that is, a communications network of signaling systems and messages which create cosmos out of chaos, harmony out of random collision. The older mechanistic view can be discarded and replaced by this idea that stress or pressure (as in an endless series of torsion bars, rods, drive-shafts, etc.) as model of the universe presents an unnecessarily cruel image of force, derived from a primitive stage of our society's technological devel opment. It is not required that each entity within the universe be compelled to act, since the notion of being compelled suggests that it does not want to or would not voluntarily do its part within the total system. Obviously, the cosmologists of the Mechanical Force View knew perfectly well that our own industrial world was supported by a slave population which had to be compelled to work, and which got nothing back for it. The universe doesn't work that way, because there is no slave-master division; it is an organism, it interacts, it has a parity of purpose and a harmony of identity.
Most questions on the order of, "Why are we here?" can't be answered because they presuppose that each of us is discrete, set off from the universe or environment, confronting it rather than a subsection of it. Modern field theory in physics will soon be extended by a process of reasonable extrapolation to the human level, at which time in the development of our understanding we will see that each of us has a reciprocal interaction with our universe; we are not particles but loci virtually arbitrarily postulated for the purpose of convenience. Hence, our right brains or right hemisphere minds are not ours, really, but as Bergson intuited, transducers or transformers which engage us within the total field. When we finally achieve bilateral parity in brain functioning, we will be better able to view our individual selves as microstations within an enormous network of similar stations which probably are so far-ranging in time and space that the idea of making contact with ETIs is like desiring to find air here on Earth.
Well, enough for now, and so to breakfast.
Letter to Claudia Bush, February 16, 1975
[4:176]
Dear Claudia,
[...] Now, herewith I'm enclosing nine strange pages I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't intended to show them to anyone; they are the carbons on notes I made for a novel, and are very personal, since at the time I thought I and only I would be reading them. However, although it will show how really wild, how really wild my inner life is, as if you hadn't suspected, it will give you something to go on re my metaphysic ... remember, these 9 pages were done before the recent series of letters I've sent you, so regard them in correct chronological order, if you will, by mentally backdating. However, since they are notes for an actual novel—no shuck—I think you will appreciate them, as they show first how the general idea came to me (a time dysfunction). That this idea is based on an actual experience of mine. How as soon as I had the handle to the idea I turned it ad hoc into a novel idea. Then into a plot. The sequence of these pages is authentic, Claudia: they show my normal procedure, the order in which these processes occur to me; for example, the title coming to me almost at once (e.g., To Scare the Dead, in this case). Claudia, when I started writing these 9 pages, on page one I did not have the idea for the novel; you will see it all at once, out of nothing in a way, and yet based on everything in my head, a year of happenings and research and thought—suddenly, "in the twinkling of an eye," there it is; nothing was premeditated before I sat down to write these. Thus you will have here a genuine record of how I always go about my work. This is the paradigm for me, for my MO. I hope you will get out of it what I know to be there: idea into novel, idea out of my life, hence novel out of my life. And so then, perhaps at long last, you will see for yourself, maybe better than anyone else ever has, the exact lines of relationship between my life and my work. Enough said, and so to mailbox, except I wish to add this: on one of these enclosed 9 pages is a bit about Zeus Zagreus, and a quote about "protecting those who ..." etc. This is what I heard in a dream. I saw before me a few sentences from the New Testament which included the name Jesus. Then this was shown me (I'm not kidding you): the name or word "Jesus" was drawn open, literally reached down into and opened, to reveal that it was a crypte morphosis, a code word, made up to conceal first the actual name of the God, which was Zagreus, and then the word was reshuffled to show that Zeus was within it, too, so that Zeus and Zagreus were within (the Being, the ontology) a "mere" code cover or what they call plaintext cypher, "Jesus." In the early days the Christians who read the plaintext would know what "Jesus" actually referred to, and then I heard the aural explanation, which was by way of telling me why help from Zeus-Zagreus-(Jesus) had come to me in March 1974. It showed me that John Allegro41 is right: the New Testament is a cypher ... but Claudia! This message? Zeus-Zagreus is the true name of the father-son god we worship? What a vast secret, and how well kept!
I really urge you to go to the new Britannica and read the article in the macro on "Mystery Religions" and all other references about them like in the article "Sacraments" et al. Christianity is a Greek mystery religion which developed logically step by step out of those which came before it. After Jesus' death, the next great step was Paul; after that the pagan writer Plotinus—not the Catholic/Christian Church; it was Neoplatonism which carried Jesus' true esoteric doctrines on, which before Jesus came out of the Orphic mysteries and so on back, especially to Zagreus. That all this had to be encoded was because of the Roman-Jewish opposition to Greek mystery cults, since several of those cults had conspired/were continually conspiring to overthrow the tyranny of Rome. (Does this not tie it up with my March experience, insights and activities?)
(Enclosure, letter to Claudia Bush, February 16, 1975)
[4:179] A time dysfunction taking the form of splitting. A person has been here and knows he has been here—the forward flow has not been interrupted—but also he has the acute sense that he has just been somewhere else at another time; he retains no direct evidence of that (serial cortical memories of events) but nonetheless he retains all the secondary impressions: that the atmospheric pressure is now different, which might be autonomic or somatic registering of a change. There are manifold retentions of prior impressions outside the field of conscious awareness; i.e., although he doesn't "remember" in the ego-sense, his entire mind-body remembers, and cannot shake off these retentions of vivid shortly-prior differences in environment. The body cannot adjust that fast, even if conscious memory is eradicated. [...] Amnesia, whether an accident or calculatedly induced, could not extend throughout the entire body and nervous system, by any sort of over-ride. All I had was an enormous set of conditioned responses—learned reflexes—which were not appropriate to this environment (time and space matrix) but evidently had just been quite recently appropriate, to another time space matrix; I could infer its aspects from them. This goes back to Time Out of Joint and what gave me the idea for it originally, a conditioned response "no longer" appropriate and unaccountable for. Nothing prior that happened to me gave such distinct impressions of a time dysfunction as the March/Rome one, which would seem to confirm that to me and for me, and then put in my writing, smaller, easier-to-absorb time dysfunctions had in truth taken place, virtually unnoticed. And certainly too small as to give a clue as to the other time space matrix (i.e., to compare the what is to the what had been). This was so massive ... but perhaps qualitatively the same. (I suppose it is possible that these are not dysfunctions, though, but deliberate adjustments, à la "Adjustment Team," in the process of continual creation. Which would account for my sense of the Holy Other in charge when this major "dysfunction" took place.) What I call a "separate entity" in my mind is simply the subsystem dissociated, split off with its own memory of that antique time-period; it is a second ego, disjunctive from mine except in sleep and especially in hypnagogic sleep.
If each of us is basically a field entelechy, then it would be this field entelechy which moved retrograde in time. Lost synchronization with the body, which continued to move fo
rward, propelled by the rest of the universe.
Enough to Scare the Dead (working book title)
The novel plot: non-S-F. A businessman, who is totally part of the present materialistic U.S. L.A. culture, all at once has the field entelechy (soul) of a 2nd century A.D. Essene come to life (resurrection) in his head, to be there along with his own; in fulfillment of the promise which Jesus Christ made, plus Paul, etc. Or just: To Scare the Dead. Plot idea: And there are others like him (a Christian resurrected underground!!).* They could even link up. Be sure to have the fish necklace girl disinhibit him, evidently deliberately. These first Christians who've come back—they don't just sit around. Plot: Protag goes through these stages, in order, to understand: (1) Reincarnation—discards; this is an occult explanation; (2) A scientific one: the Kozyrev Dysfunction. And then any other explanations: (3) and final one, which he sticks with: the Christian religious one, the resurrection into mortal life in the period of restoration, prophesied by the Bible, the time of Elijah.
Plot: He is mystified by the fierceness of this entity, its pursuit of justice; he thought Christ and the Christ-consciousness and perfected souls were "meek and mild," like the lamb. But as he reads Revelation, he learns how when Christ returns the next time, it is as judge and king, not as sacrificial lamb; this computes. These are/it is Christ reborn, all right, but Christ "as he really is," the wraps off, to defeat the tyranny, the Prince of the World, in decisive battle (v. dream in Tears). To keep this from being merely a religious type tract book, the body of it—most of it—should concern the science part: an outright scientific, maybe university lab with equipment, measuring devices (to measure his new bioplasmic electrostatic field, etc.), plus scientific personnel ... even government people looking into it? The saucer people as well as other cultists should be ill-described in the book. By making it empirically testable in a lab by guys in white smocks with clipboards and electronic test-gear, it becomes "real" to the reader.
The job the protag has: ostensibly, he's in the record biz, down here in Burbank, but for him that's a front (in fact the small label he works for is a front) for U.S. counter, looking into protest type dissident entertainers (such as Joanie42 would be). So draws two salaries. Has two hats or rôles. His nightmares about dying in a cage in Rome, under the coliseum, helpless, like a small mammal, is not a memory of his own of a former life, but how that early Christian died; he died meekly then, but has not returned to so die, die at all, this time.
Opening: protag (v. supra) shows during the source of his week a number of different, unrelated—evidently—miraculous powers, such as dematerializing the Vanquish tablets. Why? Suspense novel, written backward. What is the explanation for his supernatural powers? Why does he have them, and what links them to one another in meaning?
Like "The Angelic Angleworm" even the thread which links these powers should elude the reader. Let alone why he has them. And—what can/will he achieve by having them?
For plot purposes: (1) He shows these mysterious talents, which he himself can't fathom, and he never had them before; (2) then, after this, government agents begin to monitor him; (3) the government agents or whoever, anyhow "soldiers in business suits," close in on him in some sort of complex trap, and this is when the Holy Other in him surfaces and takes over: to totally defeat the trap. (4) From then on, he has this Holy Other living within his head, not in place of him but with him. (5) It would appear to be the government theory that he is, or more precisely, has been invaded by, an entity from another star-system. The fact that he is a government agent/employee himself doesn't help him. In this area, where they believed Earth had been invaded by ETIs, the U.S. and USSR would be working together; these "government agents" could be an international team. For instance, he could get next to a typical L.A. saucer cult group (like that Peter guy) and find left wing hip types there ... and encounter the Soviet member of this counterintelligence group, the same group, in that environment. (With afro hairdo, sandals, etc. But also a cop; this time a soldier in a sari.)
How about as a plot shock-moment he comes home, finds his house hit, files blown open, papers ransacked and stolen? They are trying to find out what he's up to, what he knows: any notes he's jotted down. Zeus-Zagreus-(Jesus) puts under His protection all who stand between the Perfect Kingdom and those persons who would destroy—nibble away at—it (i.e., those who try to press inward or reduce its boundaries).
These theories, in order:
(1) Occult: reincarnation
(2) Space people (saucer—ETI)
(3) Russian ESP mind control of U.S.
(4) Science: the Kozyrev dysfunction
(5) Resurrection of early Christian
(2) and (3) could be in reverse order. (5) is the true view.
(Zagreus is the ancient vine-root, which is cut back each year but then is reborn each year; which is eternal. The name "Jesus" in the New Testament hides first the name Zagreus but most of all Zeus.)
Our comprehension (understanding) of time is faulty; there seem to be two distinct kinds of time, at "right angles" to each other: horizontal time (as the form-regressions follow in Ubik) and vertical, which we seem aware of alone. Hence, cubic time, or time seen in both axes simultaneously, like cubic space versus two-dimensional; i.e., time moving in two directions (dimensions) at once. Events are arranged within this cubic "space" or rather time as objects are in cubic space. They move—along the vertical axis, I guess; they move naturally, as if falling; equal to the natural pull of gravity on objects; this is the ordinary time-flow forward. But along another axis they can be arranged deliberately, outside the free-fall vertical flow, if you can perceive that axis; if not, all events are stuck inexorably in sequence, or cause-and-effect (yin versus free-will or yang).
It's entirely possible that this other time axis ("horizontal time") is retrograde, an opposed time-direction, which together with the forward flow, creates "cubic time." An Empedoclean dialectic of time-forces which create, by their interaction, equilibrium.* [...]
The reality which we experience can best be described as a portion of the universe which is elsewhere moving forward, picking up elements (energy) as it goes. Basic components of our section must move to occupy certain loci because they and we are involved in a temporary reverse flow; we invent explanations—motives—for such movements to occupy such loci at such times, thus filling our reverse-moving section with forward moving verbal gabble—i.e., ideas. Our frequent strong sense of destiny or inevitability is explained by this; we must do certain things; be certain places at a certain time; some enormous force impels us (ananke). Evidently an enormously powerful explosion hurled us backward in time, that explosion being represented in our view as lying ahead of us, toward which we are moving. We will eventually all occupy the places we were in just before the explosion occurred. Actually the explosion already took place, in the past of the total universe; its past, our future. For us it lies at the end of things, toward which they move. But since there are two times, opposed fields, as the explosion hurls us farther and farther away, its force—that particular time direction—weakens, and the opposite-moving one, which drives us toward the explosion, takes over progressively more. It is as if I hit a ball uphill; it rolls and rolls upward, then a point comes where the force I imparted balances gravity and stasis occurred, then gravity causes it to begin to roll downward again, until finally it's back where it began and I hit it once more. These are the expansion-contractions of the universe.
In a sense, the universe can be read "both ways," but I think the way (direction) we read it is backward. Actually, in 1972 I did not go to Fullerton; I returned to Fullerton; my trip must be read backward. In the true past (comprehended by me wrongly as the future) I had been there already. My vision of "Mexico," of Fullerton, then, in late 1971, was actually (are you ready?) a memory of Fullerton. I knew what it was like because I remembered it (memory moving in the correct direction). Possibly (even very likely) this is a limited throw-back of a subsection of the universe
; our section will cease to move retrograde one day, eventually. Get back to where it was, and then move in the proper direction. (Move forward along a different time-path; I will be living in Fullerton, etc., then I could leave it, etc.)
Arbitrarily, say in the year 1980, we are back to the moment of direction reverse.
The Go Board which I saw, although it looked like space, was in actuality time. The teleological force [t.f.] placed events at certain intersections—in time, placed them there before the forward-motion of time reached them; the t.f. arranged them, distributed them, in a pattern, in time, as we distributed the buttons on a Go board in space. Set them economically here and there. (I guess space, too, was represented; the nexus was a space-time nexus. It reached back into time and placed buttons ahead of time.) The opposing force could only surge forward, like a tide. March 74: a time roll-back, the force or pressure emanating from the future, moving backward, retrograde. Forward vertical time re-instated itself almost at once, but—the short or brief interval revealed otherwise unsuspected weaker forces, concealed by the massive universal field of forward time. It was almost a time vacuum, into which many elements rushed. Or: the activity of other fields, always there but concealed, were temporarily visible, as they did their constant work. Equilibrium was briefly lost, in confor mity to Lem's analysis. (Had there by any chance been a Soviet experiment with Kozyrev time?) By his theories it would be experienced everywhere at once. (By those sensitive to time fluctuations, such as pre-cogs? Would they then want feedback info from distant "tracking stations"?)
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Page 13